A: Those complicit in torture and defending it. And there is great complicity across our corporate and MIC-owned government now.

Note how many of these discussions are now missing from DU. I had to go looking for many of the original sources online. This is why it's important to title articles with the actual titles of the sources...

Quite a few (seven, I think) of these links don't work anymore. For one of them, I was able to find an alternate link. I put them here anyway so you can see the titles of the missing OP's. With the exception of torture policies under Obama, I can't remember ever finding so many broken links on DU for a single topic.

My favorite recent example is the swarm response I received when I had the audacity to suggest in a thread about Ferguson that the protests by Ferguson residents should yield some ACTUAL POLICY CHANGES.

You would have thought I committed a mortal sin for bringing up the fact that this corporate administration has been complicit in the militarization of police and other policies, such as privatization of prisons, that actively *grow* exploitative communities like Ferguson.

For merely suggesting that protesters demand an end to the federal militarization programs. I was met with one of the most over-the-top, sustained, hyperbolic, and vitriolic defensive swarms that I have ever seen from the corporate posting crew here. I was even accused of not caring about RACISM because of suggesting that the protesters might actually have policy demands that might involve the Obama administration. It would have been amusing if the political motive behind it weren't so transparent and ugly. And the cherry on top was that, AFTER all these accusations were leveled against me, the Ferguson protesters *themselves* came out the very next day, demanding exactly what I had suggested.

The MO of corporate Third Way propaganda is to give lip service to the disempowerment of minority groups while DEFENDING THE MALIGNANT POLICIES THAT SUSTAIN IT and attacking those who would implicate Third Way politicians in its perpetuation and escalation.

The corporate corruption of this nation will never end as long as we yield to the bullying to refrain from holding politicians accountable just because they wear a certain team color. Dividing us by team color is a tactic and a tool by corporatists and their propaganda machines to keep us powerless in the face of what is being done to us all.

Policies that concentrate wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, while dismantling democratic protections of the masses, have NEVER resulted in empowerment of or increases in civil rights for vulnerable groups. Never in history, and not now. See my extensive links elsewhere in this thread documenting the REAL consequences of neoliberal policies on women and minority groups.

Corporatism is the ruling elite's answer to the problem of democracy replacing monarchy.

Democratic government was supposed to solve the problem of monarchy: the hoarding of wealth by a ruling elite over generations.

The goal of corporatism is to grow/transfer/redirect and SUSTAIN the wealth of this nation in the hands of a tiny, privileged elite, notwithstanding the propagandized illusion of democracy and transfer of power. It is the equivalent of monarchy, just wearing a slick democracy costume.

The Clintons and the Bushes are not the ruling elite, but they have close ties to it and are/will be handsomely rewarded for their service to it. They are not the dynasty itself (Think Rockefellers, Rothschilds...), but the corrupt, purchased political product of it; if we don't get a Clinton or a Bush, we get an Obama or a Romney. As long as our government is purchased by this fraction of the One Percent, there will always be more corrupt corporate-political puppets being groomed and waiting in the wings.

For their service in entrenching, legalizing, sustaining, and growing this monied corruption at the expense of the 99 percent, they and their children will never have to worry about anything for the rest of their lives.

1. I will grant you that Barack and Hillary BOTH love the TPP. They are two Third Way peas in a pod that way. However, it is flat out disingenuous to try to deny Hillary's major role in drafting this piece of predatory shit:

The nonpartisan Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) has already concluded that Hillary's TPP will be a vicious assault on the jobs and wages of the vast majority of American workers. Fully NINETY PERCENT of American workers will see a pay cut as a result of this axe to the throat of the American worker, and that is not even counting the jobs that will be lost altogether.

But Hillary is not even stopping there. She is also pushing for predatory increases in H1B visas that take jobs from Americans:

This is the stunning level of corruption and dishonesty we have come to expect from corporate politicians like Hillary, who LIE TO OUR FACES claiming to care about income inequality while simultaneously supporting and even AUTHORING major policies that take a sledgehammer to American jobs, wages, and futures.

Thank you. Watch the actual policies they support, not the pretty rhetoric.

Nothing is more important than stopping Hillary or any other Third Way corporatist in a Democrat suit from being shoved down our throats as the Democratic nominee in 2016.

Corporate Republicans and the corporate Third Way are not just another flavor of politician within an essentially functioning representative government. They are building perpetual war, a police and surveillance state, and using our own laws and intelligence agencies to empower corporations over the will of the American people to dismantle democracy itself.

The verdict is in: most U.S. workers would see wage losses as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping U.S. "free trade" deal under negotiation with 11 Pacific Rim countries. That's the conclusion of a report just released by the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

The verdict is in: most U.S. workers would see wage losses as a result of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping U.S. "free trade" deal under negotiation with 11 Pacific Rim countries. That's the conclusion of a report just released by the non-partisan Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).

I never claim that both parties are the same. That is a convenient strawman often used by corporate posters to divert from the *actual* main idea in a post.

In fact, I have repeatedly pointed out how the parties deliberately diverge on social issues that are important to people but which the One Percent could not care less about, in order to blackmail people into voting for the predatory economic, war, and police state agenda that the One Percent DO care about and that the parties deliberately share.

Of course, you knew that already. You might even have seen my most recent post about it here:

Mass spying on Americans? Both parties support it.
Handing the internet to corporations? Both parties support it.
Austerity for the masses? Both parties support it.
Cutting social safety nets? Both parties support it.
Corporatists in the cabinet? Both parties support it.
Tolling our interstate highways? Both parties support it.
Corporate education policy? Both parties support it.
Bank bailouts? Both parties support it.
Ignoring the trillions stashed overseas? Both parties support it.
Trans-Pacific Job/Wage Killing Secret Agreement? Both parties support it.
TISA corporate overlord agreement? Both parties support it.
Drilling and fracking? Both parties support it.
Wars on medical marijuana instead of corrupt banks? Both parties support it.
Deregulation of the food industry? Both parties support it.
GMO's? Both parties support it.
Privatization of the TVA? Both parties support it.
Immunity for telecoms? Both parties support it.
"Looking forward" and letting war criminals off the hook? Both parties support it.
Deciding torturers are patriots? Both parties support it.
Militarized police and assaults on protesters? Both parties support it.
Indefinite detention? Both parties support it.
Drone wars and kill lists? Both parties support it.
Targeting of journalists and whistleblowers? Both parties support it.
Private prisons replacing public prisons? Both parties support it.
Unions? Both parties view them with contempt.
Trillion dollar increase in nuclear weapons. Both parties support it.
New war in Iraq. Both parties support it.
New war in Syria. Both parties support it.
Carpet bombing of captive population in Gaza. Both parties support it.
Selling off swaths of the Gulf of Mexico for drilling? Both parties support it.
Drilling along the Atlantic Coast? Both parties support it.
BUT, we are reminded by sneering corporate Democrats, Republicans will do all of this to us, too, PLUS inflict transvaginal ultrasounds!

What a vicious scam by both parties to justify relentless, predatory evil. To demand that we vote for our own sellout and exploitation and the dismantling of our democracy itself.

So...now that we've determined what my point wasn't, let's post again what I actually did write:

Corporatists don't care which party wins, as long as the corporate agenda continues.

IMO both corporate parties want a Republican in next time. The Democratic Party is deliberately losing elections (Recall the DCCC "Accept Doom" email campaign) and deliberately alienating its base. Even the party mouthpieces are not just shoving Hillary down our throats, but being ostentatiously rude and obnoxious about it. The propaganda topic of the day everywhere is whether people will still vote for Hillary. I think they want people to abandon ship.

Why? Because six years of predatory Wall Street policies coming from a supposedly Democratic president have woken too many people in the country up to the fact that the parties are corrupt.

Once they have the Republican in office, I predict all the corporate Democrats will suddenly start pretending to oppose all these vicious corporate policies they have been shoving down our throats for eight years. The horrible policies will continue, and they will put on a good Kabuki show of being the vehement, albeit impotent, opposition party.

That way, the corporatists hope, the people will be reassured that we really still do have a democracy. We can stop all this silly talk about oligarchy and corruption. People will believe that the Democratic Party stands for their interests, and we can all go back to pretending that the only problem we have is that Republicans are in office and we need to get the corporate Democrats back in.

I don't think that's unclear at all.

Yes, it matters to *people* who wins elections. We are deliberately blackmailed and manipulated to support parties based on the the important social issues I mentioned (YOU DON'T WANT TO LOSE ABORTION RIGHTS, DO YOU?), but we are also relentlessly propagandized to hate the other team so that we will never unite with them to oppose the predatory economic, war, and police state agenda that the parties do share. So yes, the *people* are trained, and blackmailed, to consider party immensely important.

The oligarchs care only about putting into power whichever party can most easily, in the current political climate, continue implementing the predatory corporate agenda (economic, war, police state policies) that the two parties share.

The entrenchment and expansion of that predatory Bush agenda for two more terms, under a Democratic president who ran on Hope and Change, has awakened people to how corrupt our system has truly become. That both parties are working for Wall Street against our interests in these areas, whatever the other differences between the parties may be. That we have oligarchy rather than democracy. And that it is going to take more than voting for one of the corrupt parties to fix it.

That's the political climate in which decisions are being made about which party can most easily carry forward the next steps of the corporate takeover of this nation. And for the reasons I explained in my post, I think it will be very useful for the corporate elite to have Republicans back in power again, and corporate Democrats pretending to oppose them.

I think the behavior of corporate Democrats lately toward their own base suggests that I'm right. They're *trying* to suppress the 2016 Democratic vote.

Ran on one agenda, governs on another. Complicit in entrenching and expanding the Bush policy agenda/corporate coup of America which is systematically dismantling democratic protections including our free press, right to protest, due process...and replacing it with a disturbingly secret, increasingly authoritarian, profit-centered corporate government that engages in mass surveillance and mass campaigns of propaganda targeted at its own citizens to minimize and deny the changes listed above.

A dangerous presidency reflecting the severe corruption of our government, both parties, by corporate money flooding Washington, and the continuation of the passage of our nation from democratic representative government into bipartisan authoritarian oligarchy.